An undertaking

People who know me may know that I’m not a particularly religious person. For various personal reasons, my upbringing around the espoused ideals of Christianity didn’t exactly leave me jumping with joy for Jesus. That’s not exactly a complete or correct description. Jesus wasn’t ever really a problem so much as his followers were. I bore witness to a reasonably large amount of hypocrisy that quite honestly left me questioning the validity of the whole works. After all, it seems like a lot of people get into religion for the money. With money, comes power, and power corrupts. Followers of Christianity would think nothing of dismissing that kook Joseph Smith and Mormonism because hey, that religion was started late in the game, and Islam? Pshhh…that can’t possibly be right. Jump across the fence and you have folks on the other side of the coin giving the same dismissals to Christianity. Everybody claims only theirs is correct, the central tenets of all are often ignored, and there is archaic stuff in there that people are ok with glossing over for convenience (even as they cling to other parts). Combined with a love of science, all of this has left me rather agnostic. I’m not one to rule out the existence of a higher power, but I can’t claim to have seen evidence of the existence of such a thing either. On top of all of this, I have not read the Bible cover to cover either. I have a reasonable familiarity with all the usual stories, but can’t claim any first-hand knowledge of many of the other odds and ends I’ll occasionally stumble upon in conversation or reading. With that in mind, I’m going to take a book-by-book look at the King James version with reviews to follow. This won’t be an attempt to convert myself or you, dear reader, but more of a case of learning more about that of which I’ll periodically speak.

Stones into Schools

In a continuation of the unbelievable true story of Greg Mortenson’s life, Stones into Schools picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off to describe the tireless and ceaseless work that a group of highly diverse and fiercely dedicated people perform in order to bring hope, in the form of education, to some of the world’s most desolate, hopeless, and dangerous places on Earth. If the methodology of the Central Asia Institute (which is the official organization in support of this ambitious education initiative) gained massive amounts of support, and if those methods were applied with greater intensity across the war torn regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s easy to believe, based on Mortenson’s own proven results, that militant extremism in those countries could be drastically reduced within a generation, all without a bullet fired.

If you haven’t read either Three Cups of Tea or Stones into Schools, I cannot recommend these books enough. Greg Mortenson, reluctant though he may be to acknowledge the role, is a modern-day hero, and his story and the stories of those he works with are humanity at its best.

Neglect & Black House

For starters, I’ve been neglecting my duties in the sense that I haven’t updated this blog in ages. For what it’s worth, I haven’t really read or watched anything for a bit anyway, as I completed another rather exhausting move. Life is starting to stabilize again, and now I’ve picked up a couple of new books, and finally have the time to review the last one.

Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub marks the first pairing of these two authors since they teamed up for The Talisman. True to its release date, this book takes a couple of the characters from Talisman 20-odd years into the future (corresponding to the duration since the release of the previous installment), where we catch up with Jack Sawyer after he’s spent some time as a police detective and summarily retired to the outskirts of a small town. The brutal murder of some local children slowly but surely drags our reluctant hero out of retirement for what will be a much less than ordinary case.

I found this to be a worthy follow-up story to The Talisman, and I’d be curious to know if there’s the potential for a chapter 3 or not. King has hinted at retirement or at least slowing down, but then he dropped that monster Under the Dome, so anything’s possible. I found the story to be quite entertaining and as usual, if you’re a fan of King, Straub, or the first book, this one is worth a read.